Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist.
As much as possible given the time and space allotted is both a command and an escape clause. This directive to systematically remove as many artworks as possible from the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery storage vault and install them within the exhibition space puts forth an idea that is at once conceptually expansive, theoretically ambitious, and physically exhausting. At the same time, though, the subsequent provison “given the time and space allotted” offers a welcome limitation, a respectable excuse for inefficiency and underperformance, a solid reason to give up and turn back in our (spurious) attempts to show the entire collection.
The project’s combined bravado and absurdity is only one of its potent ironies. The bizarre collision of a 1960s systems-based conceptual approach with the aesthetics of an eighteenth-century salon is another. So, too, is the fact that a decidedly non-narrative curatorial approach (employing a system of artwork selection based purely on a work’s location in the vault) allows a surprisingly rich array of chance juxtapositions, comparative examples, and associative readings to arise. As the collection essentially “curates” itself, paratactical relationships organically emerge within an interpretive framework based on probabilities rather than predetermination. This museological methodology allows a series of unbiased selections to inspire an unconventional connoisseurship that highlights process over pedigree. In truth, our curatorial presence in this project has been largely an administrative one. More numbers than words permeate our many research documents. The production of the exhibition has encompassed the training of more than a dozen temporary staff, the confirmation of hundreds of accession numbers, the endless re-working of hand-made lists and detailed CAD drawings, as well as the mapping out of maximum installation heights based on the average reach of a human standing on five-foot scaffolding. In terms of its labour model, the project’s public side collides Fordist production lines with relational aesthetics by focusing the Gallery’s resources toward the training and remuneration of project participants who become collaborators immersed in a performative display of both themselves and of the collection.
The most potent contradiction posed by the project, however, comes from its ardent desire to display the entire collection. This desire, as we have come to see, is also the project’s greatest challenge. For every time a work is removed from its position of repose within the quiet vault and enters into the din of the world, it becomes both wondrously alive and yet dies a little death. The work, once exposed, exposes itself to the dangers of a public life against the elements and amongst the masses. And yet, is this not how the artwork “works”—by animating the space around it and drawing our eyes to its prismatic presence? This double bind—how to balance preservation with presentation—is perhaps the most intense of museological conundrums. Conservationally incompatible and always in tension, these two directives of protecting and activating are what make Ross’ photographs of the Concordia University offices so strangely poignant and the actions of the Ellen Gallery installation team so oddly compelling. When considered together, all of these aspects are what make As much as possible a project that is as outlandish as it is necessary.
– Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross
EXPLORE
- the “Salon Hanging” and its origins. What effects does this mode of presentation have both on the Gallery space and on the artworks that are exhibited in this way;
- the following concepts in relation to As much as possible given the time and space allotted: action, chance, interpretation, juxtaposition, process, risk, system;
- how the real-time activities taking place in the Gallery during this exhibition are linked to interactivity, performativity, and gesture, and the ways in which these reveal a tension between presentation and representation;
- the relationship between display and value;
- the ways in which notions of the curator and the artist shift, collide, and interchange in this exhibition.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- While Duclos and Ross have not, as curators, provided a distinctive narrative framework through which the visitor can interpret this exhibition, various narrative threads do emerge naturally and progressively. What are some of these?
- What does this means of presentation reveal about the Gallery’s collection ?
- Are visibility and invisibility important to this exhibition? Why or why not?
- What role does process play in this exhibition?
- How do gestures make use of and define the floor-to-ceiling gallery space that we are presented with in this exhibition?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
graphic standards Official Web site:
graphicstandards.org
Altshuler, Bruce, ed. Museums and Contemporary Art: Collecting the New. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Antaki, Karen, et al. Concordia Collects: Selected Art Acquisitions, 1974-2000. Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2000.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1996.
Berger, Maurice. Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979-2000. Baltimore: Center for Art and Visual Culture, 2001.
Bronson, AA, and Peggy Gale. Museums by Artists. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983.
Brooke, Janet M. Discerning Tastes: Montreal Collectors 1880-1920. Montreal: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1989.
Byvanck, Valentijn, ed. Conventions in contemporary art : Lectures and Debates, Witte de With 2001. Rotterdam: Witte de With, center for contemporary art, 2002.
Cooke, Edwy F. et al. Sir George Williams University Collection of Art. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 1969.
Crane, Susan A. ed. Museums and Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Dilworth, Leah ed. Acts of Possession: Collecting in America. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989.
Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983.
Greenberg, Reesa, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds. Thinking about Exhibitions. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Jaumain, Serge, dir. Les musées en mouvement: Nouvelles conceptions, nouveaux publics (Belgique, Canada). Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2000.
Kaprow, Allan. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Expanded Edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.
Keene, Suzanne. Fragments of the World: Uses of Museum Collections. Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2005.
Knell, Simon, ed. Museums in the Material World. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.
Knell, Simon J., Suzanne MacLeod, Sheila Watson, eds. Museum Revolutions: How Museums change and are changed. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.
Kosuth, Joseph. Play of the Unmentionable: An Installation by Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum. New York: New Press, 1992.
Macdonald, Sharon, and Paul Basu, eds. Exhibition Experiments. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Moreault, Michel. Max Stern: Montreal Dealer and Patron. Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2004.
Newhouse, Victoria. Art and the Power of Placement. New York: The Monacelli Press, 2005.
O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Pearce, Susan M., ed. Interpreting Objects and Collections. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Pearce, Susan M.. Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.
Pontbriand, Chantal, ed. Collection. Special issue of Parachute 54 (1989).
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Thompson, Barbara. Fred Wilson: So Much Trouble in the World—Believe It or Not!. Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, 2006.
Tisdale, Jane. Salon Hanging. Sackville: Owens Art Gallery, 2008.
Witcomb, Andrea. Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Produced with the support of the Frederick and Mary Kay Lowy Art Education Fund.
Curators: Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross, in collaboration with Concordia students and Gallery staff.
Produced by the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery with the support of the Samuel Schecter Exhibition Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts.
REMOVAL AND RETURN SYSTEM
As much as possible given the time and space allotted calls for as many art works as possible to be systematically removed from the storage vaults of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery and sequentially installed in the exhibition area using all spaces available. Utilizing the time allotted – six-weeks for the entire exhibition – a four-person crew handles works during gallery opening hours and continually installs until the galleries are saturated or the mid-point of the exhibition has been reached, whichever comes first. The strategy is then reversed, and all works are removed one by one from the galleries and returned to their original places within the storage vault.
The system of removal and return relates directly to the plan of the Ellen Gallery storage area, which is compartmentalized according to media. Painting racks are next to cabinets containing ethnographic items and small sculptures. These cabinets lead onto an area housing larger sculptures, which sit close to, more racks on which framed prints and photographs are located. These racks are close to a series of large bays storing oversized framed works which, in turn, sit next to a series of flat files containing unframed works on paper.
As much as possible… systematically moves around this storage space in a spirallic fashion to remove works from the racks, drawers, and bays one by one. Each cycle of extraction begins when a painting rack is slid out and the first work on the upper left-hand corner is removed, transported to the gallery, and placed on the wall. When each of the works or objects enters into the gallery, it is installed sequentially from left to right, across the top of every wall, or from back to front within the display units and on floor platforms. Artworks on the wall are fitted into the closest open areas along a horizontal line until a work can no longer fit into the last remaining space, signaling that a new wall installation is to begin. Objects, sculptures, and unframed works on paper are placed side by side or carefully layered on top of one another in their display units.
The team repeats the vault extraction process by removing a work from the upper left-hand corner of each painting rack (and so on) throughout the 28 racks. With the cabinets, the team begins at the upper level and moves down, removing objects from individual shelves or drawers beginning on the left side, front row. Sculptures are taken from their shelving units and raised floor supports depending upon their physical placement in this area; some objects are removed from the upper to lower shelves of storage units while larger sculptures are removed from a raised floor area from left to right, moving from front to back rows. The 35 print and photography racks are subjected to the same technique of upper left-hand artwork removal, as are the painting racks. The oversized framed works are taken out one by one beginning with the first bay on the left and moving across the bay with each cycle of removal. Finally, works on paper are handled with the same care as the ethnographic objects. Individual prints are lifted from each separate flat file drawer beginning with the top drawer of the left-hand cabinet and proceeding onto the next drawer below before moving onto the two adjacent cabinets to the right.
The Curators
Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross have engaged in a multi-disciplinary, research and site-based practice since 1998. Their work is primarily characterized by its investigations into the literal and metaphorical aspects of storage, the construction of social and manufactured spaces, and the inscription/invention of histories, both written and illustrated. Their collaborative and individual interests have included architectural propositions, photographic and digital video projects, and critical writing. Duclos and Ross consider all aspects of their projects—from pure research, to the rejuvenation of found materials and overlooked histories, to collaborations with other artists, students and designers—as critical to their work. Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross are based in Montreal.
THE WORKS
For this collections-based exhibition project at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, the phrase “As much as possible given the time and space allotted” is at once a title and a set of directions, a project description as well as a curatorial directive, a framework for action and a set of rules. The simple premise of the project is that as many works as possible will be removed sequentially from the gallery’s storage vault over a period of six weeks and installed in the gallery’s exhibition areas. Once the exhibition space is saturated, with all possible areas of wall and floor space occupied, the exhibition will ‘rest’ for two days. Following the resting period, the works will be sequentially returned to their place in the storage vault, leaving the gallery in its former “clean” state, thus marking the end of the project.
Because the gallery will be open to the public for the entire time that works are being installed, As much as possible provides an opportunity for the usually hidden activities of art installation and collection management to become a publicly accessible event. The viewing public will be encouraged to visit and revisit the exhibition daily or weekly to see the exhibition as it changes incrementally with each new addition — and then subsequent subtraction — of artworks.
In this way, as much as possible gestures not only to a previous history of conceptualism but also to a legacy of performance-based practices which construct a set of “actions” to be enacted as the primary activity of art-making. As collaborators, Duclos and Ross propose a hybrid project that co-opts these post-1960 “anti-institutional” postures and adapts them to a distinctly institutional scenario, creating a critique of curating that emphasizes the significance of artistic rather than museological models, operations of chance over the decisiveness of selection, the dynamic of duration over stasis, the power of juxtaposition as a form of interpretation, and the privileging of process over pedigree.
Because the project shifts the traditional terms of museological engagement with the permanent collection (which tends to elevate the directed scholarly research of the curator as providing a distinct narrative through which the exhibition’s works are to be understood), as much as possible allows other avenues of enquiry to open up.
The first is the possibility for the collection to “curate itself” through a system of random sequential display that—although initiated by Duclos, Ross, and gallery staff—is ultimately unpredictable in terms of the juxtapositions, confluences, and resonances that will be created between and amongst works exhibited in close proximity. Second is the substitution of the autonomously back-room-curated show with a real “show”—an event-based project that slowly releases works from the vault on a daily basis, handled by gallery staff and installed in full public view.
The combined public and performative aspect of the project finds another, perhaps unexpected, affinity with the architectural space in which the Gallery itself is located. Echoing the dynamic of Concordia’s McConnell Library Building whose public thoroughfare and commerce court lies just outside the gallery’s doors, as much as possible responds by making the exhibition space an equally active arena of constant movement with staff adding (and then subtracting) new works to/from the gallery’s walls each day, every day, as the exhibition runs its course over a six-week period. Wholly unable to mimic the true hustle and bustle of the atrium outside, the Ellen Art Gallery necessarily effects its own “economy of exchange” as stored objects become exhibited artworks, increasing their kind of visible “value” through an active process of being put on display.
Finally, the dynamic trajectory and intensity of certain kinds of curatorial and preparatory labour is re-directed through the project as normal exhibitionary procedures are extended through time and space (as much as is allotted). The entire curatorial endeavour becomes drawn out and may be observed like a real-time film or experienced as an event excessively lengthened.1 The project thus allows gallery staff to replace the speed, tension, and invisibility of the installation and de-installation periods with a more “evolutionary” and potentially reflective engagement with the collection during the entire course of the exhibition. Effectively adopting and adapting the slower pace of the so-called “scholarly” postures of close study and careful comparison into their own daily practice as enacted within the space of the gallery over time, gallery staff inadvertently “model” for visitors aspects of a curatorial approach to collection making and interpretation that are most often kept hidden from view.
– Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross
1 Loose comparisons might be made to Warhol’s Sleep or Leif Inge’s 9 Beet Stretch, for example.
The Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University holds approximately 1,700 works in its collection. At any given time, a portion of these works are installed throughout the University’s many buildings. In 2009 over sixty dispersed artworks were photographed in situ. In order to accommodate the project’s expansive desire to exhibit as many works as possible, these images act as proxies for those artworks that were not physically present in the vault at the time of the exhibition.